The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Today, an extra-ordinary amount of time is spent “locating places”—a business traveler looking for a client's office, a good restaurant for dinner, a coffee shop to stop at before the first morning meeting, or a golf course to entertain a client on; a resident in a metropolitan area looking for a particular type of store carrying a particular item, or a fast-food restaurant in a certain section of town; a salesman or delivery person planning a day's route; or a vacationer looking for places to visit, places to stay, places to eat-anything and everything a person might desire to experience while on vacation. Searching for places in unfamiliar areas is time consuming. Ironically, we often find ourselves searching for the same place, or same type of place, in the same unfamiliar area at a later point in time. The process of finding and selecting a place, equally involves both the “what” and the “where.” In the process to narrow down selections, candidates are qualified and picked by both meeting the requirements of what is needed, and their location or proximity to where the need is. Often to review both the “what” and the “where,” for multiple candidates at the same time, requires a search of multiple information sources, while flipping back and forth between the information sources to make an assessment. The ability to quickly locate and view both qualifications and locations of multiple candidates simultaneously would be beneficial.
Some of the most popular tools used for locating and/or qualifying a POI include; telephone directories—both the white and the yellow pages, printed maps, printed travel guides, and Internet searching and mapping. Other popular locating tools include electronic travel and business maps as found on PC's, palm devices, and in-vehicle systems, and communications devices, like a telephone, where, for example, a call is made for information and/or directions. In some scenarios, the communications may be wireless and may not require voice. Tools are chosen based their effectiveness in accomplishing a particular task in the least amount of time. Each of the above mentioned tools has its own benefits and shortcomings.
Tools with the most promise involve the use of digital maps, where the benefits of viewing various locations by proximity can be realized. This requires the address of the location to be converted to a place on the map, using a process called address geocoding, and a high degree of emphasis has been placed on development of this. Address geocoding is a process of creating or calculating a set of geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) from a street address, using what Geographic Data Technology, Inc. (GDT) refers to as an Address Coding Guide (ACG). An ACG consists of sets of files that provide city, state, and zip code data needed to locate addresses. It also contains street segment information that includes the street name and starting and ending house number for both odd and even numbered sides of the street. The ACG also contains information designed to compensate for the fact that addresses, address abbreviations, locality names, and so on, have many variations, and that some streets may be referenced by more than one name. It generally contains a spell correction program to fixes errors such as one letter differences, extra spaces, missing spaces, transposed characters, etc.
The ACG also incorporates an address-match strategy that can be set from aggressive to conservative. As one party describes this, “The Conservative strategy follows the strictest set of rules. At the other extreme, the Aggressive method uses the most flexible rule set for finding addresses. In other words, it is able to find more addresses at the expense of accuracy. The differences among the strategies are illustrated in the following examples. In the first example, you want to find the location of the house address 420 James St., but the street database only contains segments for James St. with the ranges of 2-98, 100-198, and 200-298 for the given locality. The Find Address command would not find a match for this address using the Conservative or Normal address-match strategies. With the Aggressive strategy, it would match it to the 200-298 segment because the house address number 420 is within 200 of the house address range on that segment. The software would place the geocoded point on the high end of the segment at the same point where the address 298 James St. would be placed. In a second example, you want to find the house address of 320 James St. As in the previous example, the Normal address-matching strategies would match to the 200-298 segment because that is within 100 of the range on that segment, as would Aggressive. The location of this address would not be found using the Conservative strategy.”
The creating or building of an Address Coding Guide is an enormous task. The TIGER database, used by the US Census Bureau in the street level mapping of the US, is generally used as the base for the ACG's in the US, but it is incomplete, and with continuing building construction, updating is needed more often than every 10 years. The capturing of the latitude and longitude coordinates is performed by researchers driving up and down streets with elaborate electronic data collection devices. U.S. Pat. No. 6,687,612 describes one such system that utilizes an electronic glove for interpreting hand and finger gestures of the researcher while the data collection system is being driven around.
Theoretically, once all the roads are mapped into the ACG, any street address can be converted into a latitude and longitude, or what is referred to as a geocode for geographic coordinate, for marking a position on a digital map. In practice, the collection of the latitude and longitude of every road in the US is a massive, labor intensive, and hence expensive task, as evidenced by the patenting of elaborate collection devices. Until this process is completed, if one assumes it can ever be completed with continuing building construction, there will always be holes or errors in the ability of the database to return a correct or accurate geocode for an entered address.
Some have estimated that between 15% and 20% of the addresses attempted to be mapped, are not mapped to an exact numbered street location. Quite often a “best match” is produced, where using more aggressive strategies than described above, the entered address is matched to a zip code, or a city, or to a place along the street where the city or zip code boundary changes. On rarer occasions, the address is matched to the geo-centroid of the state, or the centroid of the US, which is near Alton, Kans. Mapping percentage accuracies decline in rural areas, where roads are more remote, and rural routes without numbers, rural route boxes and PO boxes are used more frequently. Inaccurate matches can be caused by a plethora of things, including; 1) the street and its numbering has not yet been geocoded—vanity addresses, which can be mistaken for driveways, seem to be the last to be captured; 2) the entered address is incomplete—missing either the street number and the street name and the street type; 3) the entered address is, or contains, a PO box, a building number, or a suite number; 4) the entered address contains a spelling error, a typographical error, or an abbreviation not matching the abbreviations used in the database, 5) the street has multiple names, both official and unofficial, and all have not been captured in the database; 6) the official or posted mailing address either does not contain, a street number, or a street name, or it reads “1 mile South of town,” or the mailing address is in a different town from which the POI is actually located; 7) a particular region uses an unconventional means of numbering or naming streets, i.e. using dashes or letters within the street number (93-124, or N100), or using numbers within the street name (Avenue 47); and more.
The above geocoding techniques and resulting errors also are found in Internet mapping services, like MapQuest or Yahoo! Maps, in PC-based travel map programs, like Microsoft's Streets and Trips, or Delorme's Street Atlas USA, and in PC-based business map programs, like Microsoft's MapPoint, or ESRI's BusinessMap.
Not all POI's are best located by a street address. Therefore, using a geocoding process exclusively, for finding and locating these POI's, has serious shortcomings. This includes POI's located in an airport terminal, or in a shopping mall, especially where the mall sits further back from the street. For example, the LAX airport has 10 Starbuck's coffee shops in 8 different terminals, all of which have the same address and geocode to the same location in typical map programs. Often all the stores in a mall will have the same address. The travel and business map programs, thus far, have not included any airport terminal or shopping mall building outlines.
The travel mapping and business mapping programs available today boast of including millions of places of business and points of interest, or POI's. While their advertising emphasizes quantity, including the ability of the programs to locate nearby hotels, restaurants, service stations, ATM's, and other POI's, there exists a lack of dependability in use. The included sets of POI's are incomplete and fragmented, POI's are incorrectly classified, and contain duplicate, discrepant and seriously outdated items and data. The approach to deciding which POI's to include can only be described as piecemeal, as if they were cherry picked.
For example, advertising for the 2004 version of one of the more popular travel mapping programs says the program includes 7,000+ golf courses. What they don't advertise, and what the public generally doesn't know, is that almost 18,000 golf courses exist in the US. They don't advertise that 10,000 golf courses, the lion's share, were left out. This same program only included a few hundred Starbuck's coffee locations, when over 6,000 exist in the US, and this is on the fourth annually updated version of the program. These deficiencies are not regular or predictable, and are only discovered during use or by performing a quality check. This general lack of consistency and thoroughness is one of the reasons these programs are not used more frequently and relied upon as a means of locating POI's.
The travel mapping and business mapping programs available today also make it difficult to locate any included POI's on the map. Often, POI's can only be seen, or be fully identified, by zooming in to street magnification level and scouring the map. POI's either disappear or loose their recognizable identities at higher, zoomed-out, levels. How many streets does one need to scour, looking for a coffee house, before concluding their may not be one in the area, or at least not one on the map?
Many, if not all, of the map programs have search features, where one can look for a Starbuck's coffee house, for example. The search can often yield a long listing of stores with the address (street, city and/or state) in which they are located. Often these are listed alphabetically. If one is familiar enough with the area being visited, a nearby street, town or suburb might be recognized by scrolling down the list. However, more often than not, visitors by definition are less familiar with the areas being visited. Browsing though the list, while occasionally highlighting one of the listings to then see if its mapped location looks at all familiar, can be a time consuming and frustrating ordeal.
The POI's included in the mapping programs include many familiar fast-food franchises. When a familiar type of place is viewed on the map, one may know what to expect on a visit. However with some POI's, additional information is often needed before a visit. Golf courses are a good example. Knowing the type of course, public or private, the number of holes, the fees, the degree of difficulty, etc. is essential in deciding where to play. As another example, it would be useful to know more about a restaurant with an unfamiliar name; does it have a drive-up window, or a five star rating? A mapping program might show winery locations, but one needs to go to another source of information or make a phone call to find hours of operation, whether they have wine tasting, and how much the winery charges for this. The standard telephone directory, contact type information of name, address and phone number, currently provided on these mapping programs, is lacking in information to make a decision on whether to further pursue a candidate POI.
Some mapping programs integrate basic “Yellow Pages” listings, where POI searching can be performed by category listing. There are a number of issues with this generalized approach. As mentioned above, there is the thoroughness or completeness issue with the percentage of businesses (POI's) that list in the yellow pages. There are also issues with placing POI's in categories. While a particular POI may be included in the mapping program, it may not be found under the category where one might expect to find it. Is a pizza parlor with a takeout or drive-thru window listed under pizza places, fast-food places or by cuisine under Italian restaurants? Is a golf course with a driving range listed under Golf Courses or Golf Practice Ranges, or both? How is a yellow page Golf Course listing for Discounted Tee Times to be mapped?
The above described piecemeal, slap-it-together, cherry picking practices for including POI's in mapping programs and in in-vehicle systems, have resulted in a lower than expected acceptance of the products as effective POI location tools.
Some map programs allow sets of data with addresses to be imported and mapped. This allows a frequent traveler to create sets of POI's for favorite chains of restaurants or coffee houses, for example. The process involves capturing data and formatting it in a database file compatible with the map program, and then importing it, where the addresses are geocoded. The geocoding process, however, is subject to the same accuracy problems described above, and some programs do a better job than others in informing which points where mapped accurately by street address, and which were mapped to a less accurate location like a city, or zip code, and which were not mapped at all.
Some programs provide the user with mapping location options during the import process, others do not. Some programs identify specifically how each point was mapped, others do not. None of the programs, however, make it easy or convenient to correct the records that were inaccurately mapped, nor do they capture any information on the mapping location options presented during the import process. The address information in the exported data set, where an exporting function is available, is identical to that imported. So the extra time and effort spend in researching and resolving options presented during importing, is lost.
The above process applies similarly to the importing of a business contact file from a contact management, sales force automation, or customer relationship management (CRM) type of program. These contact management programs make it easy to store and find contact information, such as names, addresses and telephone numbers. The more sophisticated, higher-end programs provide reporting functions and allow several people in a workgroup to access the same database of contacts. Microsoft Outlook and ACT! are an examples of contact management programs, while SalesLogix, GoldMine, TeleMagic, Maximizer are examples of team-based software packages, which synchronize or centralize the sales automation and CRM functions. Some of the business mapping programs, like MapPoint and BusinessMap, provide links to map the contact database from contact management programs, but the mapping process again requires address geocoding, and is therefore subject to the same accuracy problems described above. Again, none of the programs make it easy or convenient to correct the records that are inaccurately mapped.
Mapping programs fall under the category of GIS (Geographic Information System) programs, which in turn are related to CAD (Computer Aided Design) and CADD (Computer Aided Design and Drafting) programs or development tools, hereafter referred to as just CAD. Many of the more popular GIS programs have evolved from, or merged with CAD programs, or are CAD programs with GIS extensions. In these programs, data is organized and stored into thematic layers in data files.
GIS programs used by infrastructure personnel, city planners and civil engineers at municipalities, have captured and created separate map layers for such things as; water pipes, gas lines, street lights, sewers, storm drains, fire hydrants, traffic lights, cable line, electrical lines.
Some of the earliest CAD applications, dating back to the early 80's, focused on capturing electrical schematics and laying out printed circuit boards (PCB's). The PCB CAD layout programs employed separate layers to capture each set of characteristics of the board, including; the bottom (solder side copper trace) layer, the top (component side copper trace) layer, the physical outline of the printed circuit board, thru hole locations and diameters, the solder mask, and the silk screen legend. These all were registered to the same grid or common coordinate system. PCB designers could view a composite or any combination of layers during the board layout process. The top side copper trace layer was viewed in one color, and the bottom layer traces in another.
There is a significant difference between GIS programs and travel or business map programs, and how they handle POI's. The GIS programs fall more into CAD-based development tools or authoring tools category. GIS programs are used to create and maintain (update) a continuously increasing number of information data layers. These programs have extensive control over the viewing of all the thematic layers, for example; the order in which the layers are viewed (which layer is on top), fading layers in and out, assigning of symbols, colors, and line widths, shading, etc., to any point, line or area (polygon) in any layer. These programs require an extensive amount of training and experience to become proficient in their use.
On the other hand, the travel or business map programs are not design/development tools. They are meant to be simple to use, easy to learn application programs, functioning more like a lightweight GIS data viewer with respect to the POI's supplied in the program. While the POI's included in the travel or business programs can be turned on and off, they cannot be modified, edited, enhanced, deleted or added to by the user.
Some of the travel and/or business mapping programs allow external data records to be imported or linked into their programs. During the import process, address fields are identified to allow geo-coordinates to be developed from the street address. Imported records then appear as pushpins on the map, which can be assigned unique pushpin symbols, or colors, allowing multiple data sets to be imported and remain uniquely identifiable. However, the importing process, and the manipulation, control and display of the imported data in currently available products leaves much room for improvement.